WORKPLACE PLANNING
the data in this way (we also analysed it via departments, tenureship, and age range), we were able to create targeted recommendations for the Trust, which focused on solving the critical needs first, with the less urgent needs shown as more long-term goals. Alongside the physical space
requirements, we also analysed working patterns, to see how these had evolved throughout the pandemic. We asked how much time employees spent home working pre-COVID, vs how much time they anticipated they would post- pandemic. Employees revealed on average an increase from approx. one hour a week to one day a week. This of course varied from role to role, and in order to capture this accurately we created 11 personas, which fell into four categories: home working, office-base, clinical-based, and community-based. Each persona aligned with a certain way of working. For example, the ‘Home Anchor’ persona spent 4+ days a week at home, and one day a week in the office or clinical space. In contrast, the ‘Office Satellite’ persona spent 3+ days a week in a non-clinical hospital space, but only approximately 2 hours a day at their desk, the rest of the time spent between meetings.
critical as the space requirements. We also asked questions around wellbeing and ‘coping in the workplace’. This section again scored low, with items such as ‘access to natural daylight for 50% of your working day’, and ‘calming spaces’, showing as extremely important to employees, but currently ‘underperforming’ or non-existent. Interestingly, we asked employees
to select words that described their workplace, and across the Trust the same words repeated: Friendly, Welcoming, Clean, and Professional. This showed a
60 Health Estate Journal May 2022
good connection between employees in spite of their unmet requirements, and reiterated the need to provide better spaces for them to perform their roles to the best of their ability.
Implications for the Trust The Trust surveyed includes three acute hospitals and several community sites. For each question in the survey we evaluated the data collected as an overall statistic, and then also looked at it per hospital. By doing this it became clear that some hospitals performed better than others in different requirements. By analysing
Representing real-time working patterns These personas were created using the data provided by the employees so that each one represented real-time working patterns. The Trust was then able to scrutinise which roles were falling into which persona, allowing us to flag up where a role could be encouraged into a more hybrid way of working. The trend we saw was a reduction in the need for dedicated desks or offices among non- clinical employees. Many administrative staff have been working from home since the start of the pandemic, and were open to continue doing this. The personas cut across traditional professional boundaries. Some clinicians had the same personas as some admin staff, and this allowed us to focus solely on work patterns. We were keen to move away from focusing on job descriptions, and falling back to default assumptions about how different professions worked.
A new space budget Our research gave us a robust foundation in which to create a new space budget for the Trust. Once we knew how many days a week employees actually required a desk and workspace, we were able to do this with space-sharing options in mind. This underutilised space could then be repurposed to meet the long-standing unmet demand for improved staff space, wellbeing space, and areas for frontline employees. Furthermore, these spaces
© Arcadis
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